All Stepped /Undone- is Michael McAloran’s fifth full poetry collection, and his second full collection with Oneiros Press. Tracing a line through McAloran’s work to date, one can discern a drive to whittle his poetic voice to its essential core.

All Stepped /Undone- is sometimes a griefscape, the collection is by turns both nihilistic and elegiac in its tone:

The three parts of All Stepped /Undone- are : till claimed – of thin dreaming – and all stepped /undone-

till claimed- and of thin dreaming – are quite similar in form and in their sharing of theme and image. all stepped /undone- while sharing and picking up on these themes is aphoristic and condensed in its poetic expression:

head of dust / no /that was the drapery of the silence / called upon /subtle till graceless / till bounty / reflected upon /lest the burgeoning see

One can see the development of McAloran’s voice from his earlier collection of aphorisms, Attributes, through the third section of this current book. His poetic voice has become skilled and honed to allow for his sure expressiveness which he achieves in the least amount of words.

Readers of Michael McAloran would do well to acquire the books Attributesand In Damage Seasonsto see how he has developed and opened out his poetic work. I mention those previous works in particular as they are most related to the current text under review, in my view.

I feel that McAloran is directing his skill toward a quality of expressiveness that is the sure mark of the artist. He is developing a mature poetic voice that has a quality of tone rare in contemporary Irish poetics :

back-flexed / the arrow’s breath to claim the sky of / night / the bread broken / such was the blade’s redeem / or the blood-cut star of light / glistening /of the heart’s tolling

Whilst related to McAloran’s collection of aphorisms, Attributes, in form, and to In Damage Seasons – in its intent and expression, this work is more loosely structured than both, and is therefore built wholly in the active poetic voice. The poet’s voice as mouthpiece of the internal landscape. In this case the voice or protagonist is mouthing his grief and alienation.

Of the three parts to this book , till claimed- is the furthest the writer will go in terms of his willingness to express alienation. The poems herein, and those of in of thin dreaming- are generally longer than in the final eponymously titled section.

There is as always with McAloran a complexity of image and a deprecating humour, the poem scuttle- can be read a few ways:

One is never quite sure, hence my delight at word-play and at McAloran’s image-play/ply of. With McAloran a longer poem can be less expressive than the short aphorism. it is often akin to witnessing the unleashed voice in I (till claimed – ) warm up and spit out a gully :

Note : I have linked my reading of In Damage Seasons- here , the reason being that while the two texts share a tripartite structure , they are vastly differing works in terms of how the writer manages his expression. In Damage Seasons- has a structural containment, a triptych architecture, that felt almost imprisoning as it tied down the poet’s voice.